As the use of plastic cards for credit cards, identification cards and the like continues to become more widespread, credit card fraud and identification card fraud are becoming increasing problems. The ease in which criminals have been able to manufacture or manipulate known cards is a result of the existence of the easily-altered magnetic stripe storage medium used by current cards. These magnetic stripes are easy to program and reprogram using commonly available technology, resulting, e.g., in so-called magnetic stripe cloning.
Thus, there is a need in the plastic card industry to provide a more secure plastic card that is more difficult or nearly impossible to duplicate or to manipulate. The likely successor to the magnetic stripe cards is known as a memory card or smart card. The smart card can generally be described as a card having an integrated circuit with memory that is capable of securely storing data and/or executing processing functions.
Contact smart cards make contact through several contact pads place on the surface of the card. These pads provide electrical connectivity when inserted into a reader, which is typically used as a communications medium between the smart card and a host. Cards typically do not contain batteries—power is supplied by the card reader—through some of these contact pads.
The most recent development in smart cards is a contactless card that interacts with a terminal reader using electromagnetic coupling. The smart card incorporates an inlay that is a symmetrical substrate incorporating a micro chip bounded to an antenna and functioning as the heart of a radio-frequency identification (RFID) part, a near field communication (NFC) chip, or similar chip credential. This smart card requires only proximity to a reader antenna to communicate. Contactless cards also typically operate without batteries and obtain power through induction from the electromagnetic field of the reader antenna. When in proximity to a reader antenna, they accumulate charge from the electromagnetic field, power up and consequently respond to commands over the same radio frequency channel, communicating in a bi-directional manner. Contactless technology is rapidly replacing traditional machine readable identification technologies in numerous applications such as those employing bar codes and magnetic stripes, offering substantially enhanced security and convenience.
For some applications it is preferred to provide a smart card that allows insertion into a reader, as well as contactless interaction. These so-called dual-interface cards implement contactless and contact interfaces on a single card, sometimes with some shared storage and processing. However, when manufacturing such cards, the electrical connections of a dual interface module that include the chip and the contact pads for contact operation, as well as an antenna with contacts for contactless operation that are embedded in the same card body, causes problems.